Willow Garage selects Clearpath robotics to service and support the PR2 robot Through 2016

Submitted by rbauer on Fri, 01/17/2014 - 05:38

Clearpath Robotics welcomes the PR2 robot and community to its growing family

(Menlo Park, CA and Kitchener, ON, Canada – January 15, 2014) Willow Garage, the developer of PR2, announces the immediate transfer of support and services responsibilities to Clearpath Robotics, a leader in mobile robotics for research and development. Willow Garage’s development of PR2 along with the Robot Operating System (ROS) has produced the world’s leading mobile manipulation platform for research and development. Willow Garage will continue to sell its remaining stock of PR2 systems while Clearpath Robotics now becomes the sole provider of hardware and software support to current and future PR2 customers. Interest in PR2 systems should continue to be directed to Willow Garage through its portal at www.willowgarage.com, while members of the PR2 community should direct correspondence to www.clearpathrobotics.com.

“Willow Garage is committed to continue to support customers of its PR2 personal robotics platform,” said Scott Hassan, Founder and Chairman, Willow Garage. “I am delighted that Clearpath Robotics will be fulfilling that commitment at least through 2016.“

“The PR2, along with ROS, changed the pace of robotics research and created history,” said Matt Rendall, CEO at Clearpath Robotics. “We’ve been a champion of ROS since the start, so we understand and value the PR2 community and their work. We’re ecstatic to take on service responsibilities for this piece of history, and advance development within the community.”

The PR2 is a compliant mobile manipulation platform built by Willow Garage. Released for production in 2010, the robot’s safe, modular design spurred groundbreaking research in the fields of autonomy, mobile manipulation, and human robot interaction. The standardized platform enables researchers to share their work and leverage the open source software community (ROS); today over 1000 software libraries exist for the 40 PR2’s in use in over a dozen countries.

Clearpath Robotics has been a longstanding partner of Willow Garage as an early adopter of ROS, the first manufacturing partner for Turtlebot, founding sponsors of the annual ROS developers conference, ROSCon, and Clearpath’s CTO, Ryan Gariepy, is a founding board member for the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

Willow Garage developed hardware (including PR2) and open source software (including ROS) for personal robotics applications. It was founded on the vision that personal robots is the next paradigm­shifting personal productivity tool. Willow Garage was organized to encourage spin­outs and created eight companies from 2011­13. Among these companies are Suitable Technologies, the leading provider of products that let people be where they need to be regardless of where they are in the world, as well as Redwood Robotics and Industrial Perception Inc. that were recently purchased by Google Inc.

About Clearpath Robotics

Clearpath Robotics, a global leader in unmanned vehicle robotics for research and development, is dedicated to automating the world’s dullest, dirtiest, and deadliest jobs. The Company serves robotics leaders in over 30 countries worldwide in academic, corporate, industrial, and military environments. Recognizing the value of future innovation, Clearpath Robotics established Partnerbot, a grant program to support university robotics research teams, internationally. Clearpath Robotics provides robust robotic vehicles and autonomous solutions that are engineered for performance, designed for customization, and built for open source. Visit Clearpath Robotics at www.clearpathrobotics.com, follow us on Twitter @clearpathrobots or like us on Facebook.